Well, it's true there were no tape recorders, but we do have a lot of comparative material to work with. For example, how the Romans spelled Greek words.<br /><br />Also, the Greeks themselves wrote manuals to help barbarians learn how to correctly speak the language, too, which is how we know that Greek accents are pitch accents.<br /><br />I have a few links to pages about this subject at http://www.aoidoi.org/links.php.

An other thing we can consider is the words that represent animal sounds.
The voice of an animal cannot change through the centuries (which happens with human language) so they can give us valuable and secure information, For example in an late classical text someone describes the way someone else talks. He says that he talks like a sheep " bh=, bh="
(bee, bee). Judging fromthis we can conclude that the greek letter βwas pronunced as b (v in modern greek), and the letter η was pronunced as ee(i in modern greek.

I listened to it and I could not find a whole lot 'offputting' about his voice.
I don't have the words so I could not read along, but I had the impression that there was not a whole lot of difference between the long and short vowels.
I listened to http://www.rhapsodoioralgreekandlatin.org/iliad1.htmI found this maybe a little overdone but who am I to say.
I think that an ancient Greek listening to a modern opera would find it overdone.
I liked listening to it though because I could read along.
I could not really detect the consistent pattern of the hexameter though.
Maybe a bit more practice in reading myself.

hi, i agree, i personally like the sounds of Stefan Hagel's clips... i find daitz's clips a little offputting because he bends his long vowels when aristoxenus says that (in song) they're held steady, but i still find it useful listening to his clips, because they're accurate in their structure and their phonemes, as far as i can tell.

so are hagel's clips too of course... he emailed me a computer-generated model of the pitch structure of the first few lines of the iliad... it's interesting, the way we both model the pitch of these lines is almost identical (except for the pitch emphasis in proper names), but he's developed a sophisticated computer-automated approach (which could probably model the whole iliad in a few seconds), while my approach is slow unsophisticated manual work...